[Pythonmac-SIG] Bob Ippolito's synopsis of Python(s) on OS X

[Kevin Altis]

On Mar 31, 2004, at 8:50 AM, eichin at metacarta.com wrote:

>
>> The flip side of the coin is that people coming from other platforms
>> who want to make a cross-platform program will be discouraged from
>> supporting the Mac at all -- because "the cross-platform toolkits are
>> broken" and they don't want to have to learn a whole new
>> platform-specific toolkit for that platform.
>
> Exactly - there's no particular benefit to me to learn a mac-specific
> GUI toolkit[1], because most of the things I write need to run on
> Linux and Solaris as well.  Also, I don't need an especially
> *advanced* toolkit - my apps simply aren't going to have particularly
> impressive interfaces, it is enough that they do simple things in ways
> that don't clash.  I just want to develop on my Mac so that I can run
> elsewhere as well[2].

Choice is a good thing. It is great that PyObjC exists. At the same 
time, there is a very large population of coders that have zero 
interest in learning Cocoa which is where the cross-platform toolkits 
come in. Writing code for a single platform is so '80s <wink> but 
PyObjC has a different audience and that is fine. In fact, I hope that 
PyObjC becomes a much more mainstream way of coding Cocoa applications 
and becomes much better integrated into Apple developer tools and 
documentation.

I can't speak for PyGTK and PyQt or Tkinter, but I do know that 
wxPython will continue to improve on Mac OS X with each release even 
while the underlying wxMAC C++ code is based on Carbon. Eventually the 
base will be wxCocoa. Stefan Csomor and Kevin Ollivier are both active 
wxWidgets/wxPython developers. The OSAF, which is producing Chandler is 
Robin Dunn's employer and the OSAF just hired David Surovell as the GUI 
Frameworks Software Engineer. It is critical that for Chandler to kick 
butt on Mac OS X as well as Windows and Linux, so wxPython will just 
continue to get better and better on the Mac.

Mac OS X users and developers are lucky because they get more options 
and the best of both worlds.

ka